Resistance Updates Now Available

via Kotaku


New game types! New game options! New spectator mode! New death tally corrections when a player dies by drowning! It's finally here. Insomniac Games has released the game expanding update for Resistance: Fall of Man officially announced earlier this month and online PLAYSTATION 3 deathmatchers will want to download this puppy ASAP.

Another Resistance update is scheduled for May, which will include two new maps and worldwide online play support.

You can read the full list of changes after the jump. Watch for yours truly on R:FoM multiplayer this evening and enjoy kicking my ass.

Insomniac Games and Sony Computer Entertainment America have released the second content update for Resistance: Fall of Man. This update features two new modes of play amongst a host of other changes.

New Gametypes
- Added Team Conversion
In Team Conversion your goal is to kill everyone on the other team before they kill your team. Players are given a limited number of lives as a human and Chimera. If your team has at least one player with at least one life when the other team is completely dead, your team wins. You become a spectator when you have lost all your lives.

In Team Conversion mode, you are scored by how long you survived and how many other players you killed, like in free-for-all Conversion. However, the win goes to the last team with one or more players alive.

- Added Assault
Both teams start with a few nodes and all of the base defenses from Breach. To win, destroy the enemy reactor. When you deactivate an enemy node, it becomes permanently neutral, and your opponents lose some base defenses. At the start of the match, both reactors are shielded (invulnerable), so you must deactivate at least one of the enemy nodes. Nodes do not regenerate health in Assault, but they take substantially more damage than in other modes.

Individual players are scored based on damaging the enemy reactor and defending your reactor and nodes. Unlike other gametypes, players are also awarded points for damaging enemy nodes.

When you are killed, the map will appear. In an Assault match you can choose to respawn at nodes that have been deactivated as well as your team's reactor and active nodes, or with your squad if you are a member of one.


New Game Options
- Added "Round Balancing"
Round balancing can be set to either "on" or "off". It will default to "on". When round balancing is "on", if the number of players on each team is uneven at the end of the round, players will be moved from the team with too many players to the team with too few players to attempt to balance the teams. Parties will not be seperated, so it is not guaranteed to result in perfectly balanced teams. Round balancing is turned ON for ranked games.

- Added "enhanced" radar mode
"enhanced" radar is a new radar option. In custom games, the radar option can now be set to "on", "off", and "enhanced". In enhanced radar mode, human radar will show any enemies who are moving (not just sprinting/raging), jumping, or firing. Enemies who are crouching and moving will not show up on radar in "enhanced" mode.

Spectator mode
- Added "Spectator mode"
You may now join a game in "spectator mode", either by selecting "spectate" from the "Join Game" popup in the "Find Game" screen, or by bringing up your options menu from the "Staging" screen and changing your team until it says "Spectators". Games are limited to having 10 spectators, and there is a new game option "Allow Spectators" which defaults to "on" that may be turned off if the game creator does not want to allow spectators. Ranked matches do not allow spectators.

Spectator players will not be visible to anyone else in-game (although they will be visible in the staging screen), nor will they be able to talk to anyone except other spectators using the voice chat. Spectators can see all players on both teams on their radar. Spectators can toggle between two modes, "Observer" and "Free roam". In "Observer", spectator will see through the eyes of the player they are observing, including seeing the player's first person weapon and animations. Spectators can switch between observing different players with the "Melee/Action" key (default: Triangle), or switch to "Free roam" mode with the "Reload" key (default: Square). In "Free Roam" mode, spectators may wander freely about the map to view the action however they want. Spectators in "Free Roam" mode can switch back to "Observer" mode by pressing the "Reload" key (default: Square). If a spectator in "Free Roam" mode toggles to "Observer" mode while aiming at a player, he will observe the player he was aiming at instead of randomly selecting a player to observe. In both "Free Roam" and "Observer" mode, spectators can toggle their onscreen HUD on or off by pressing the "Zoom" key (default: R3).

In gametypes with limited lives (such as conversion, or if limited lives has been turned on by the game creator), players who lose all their lives and are eliminated will enter spectator mode, with a few small differences: Eliminated players cannot observe players on the opposite team, they can only see what their team sees on the radar, and they can only chat with other eliminated players (NOT with spectators).

UI Improvements
- Sorted buddy list by online status
- Made text on the map easier to read
- Players added to the ignore list will be removed from the buddy list
- Previously the health of a node was indicated by how fully shaded it was in the color of the team that controlled it or was capturing it. This was difficult to see, and it did not distinguish between nodes that were in the process of being captured from nodes that were in the process of being detroyed. Now nodes will have a health bar underneath the node (which will be team colored) to indicate its health, and the color of the node icon will indicate whether any team is in control of that node or not (it will be colored that team's color, or gray if no team controls it). Therefore if a node is in the process of being captured will have a team colored health bar and a gray icon, and a node in the process of being destroyed will have a team colored health bar and a team colored icon.

General
- Optimized net code
- Improved respawn algorithm to avoid selecting spawn points near enemies
- Optimized join game process for ranked game to be faster and more reliable, especially for large parties

Balancing
- Increased points for a "defense" kill from 1 to 4 in all modes
- Shotgun damage will decrease faster as range increases
- LAARK respawn time increased to 90 seconds, ammo respawn time increased to 60 seconds
- LAARK splash damage radius reduced
- Carbine headshot damage increased

Bug Fixes
- In FFA gametypes, you can no longer incorrectly see players on the radar who are within radar range of other players but not within radar range of you.
- Chimeran players no longer take extra melee damage from some weapons
- Enemies killed after you die but before you respawn will no longer count towards your killing spree for your next life
- Deaths will now tally correctly when a player dies by drowning
- Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the wrong map to load after a map vote
- Fixed problem where the quality of the microphone chat would degrade over time when in a party or long game
- Fixed bug that would cause you to reload after firing one shot if you had full ammo and hit reload and then fired in rapid succession
- Fixed several collision problems, including potential methods of escaping from the intended play area
- Fixed several potentially exploitable gameplay glitches
- Fixed several rare crash bugs